Honestly, It’s Time for “Destiny 3”
Nelson Schneider - wrote on 01/17/21 at 03:29 PM CT
Live Service games always generate some amount of controversy. Whether it’s their intentionally-addictive design that ropes gamers in for more hours-per-week than they really ought to be spending with a single game, or heavy-handed monetization schemes that force invested players to continuously shell-out more cash to keep up with the proverbial “Joneses,” or some other, even-more-nefarious bit of corporate manipulation, there’s just something about an always-on, always evolving videogame that invites questionable social experimentation.
The MeltedJoystick Crew is generally quite leery of Live Services and MMOs, but we’ve been (mostly) pleasantly surprised by the few we’ve given a shot. No Live Service has had such a large and long-lasting impact on us (and I don’t just mean that as the Royal Us – it applies to everyone on the team) as “Destiny 2,” Bungie’s multi-platform sequel to their first post-“Halo” game development effort, the …
10 (!) Games to Look Forward to in 2021.
Nelson Schneider - wrote on 01/09/21 at 03:27 PM CT
Last year, I received a special request to talk about the upcoming game releases for 2020 that the curators at MeltedJoystick were keeping an eye on. Of course, we had no idea at the time that the year was going to bring a pandemic with it, which screwed with industries, arts, and release dates across the board. Then there’s the elephant-in-the-room sized fact that the Games Industry universally does a poor job of pre-announcing release dates and sticking to them (even when cracking the whip via mandatory “crunch” work schedules, which are ultimately useless anyway, since the hang-up in such cases nearly always falls at one department’s feet, making punishing everyone with mandatory, unpaid overtime completely pointless).
That said, after sorting through the hundreds of ports, remasters, and remakes coming in 2021 (what, you thought the flood would slow down instead of speed up?), it looks like a much more exciting year than its predecessor.
10. “Bravely Default 2” …
New Year’s Backlog Ablutions 2021
Nelson Schneider - wrote on 01/03/21 at 02:12 PM CT
The results from last year’s revised New Year’s Backlog Ablutions are in, and it seems that the challenge was a bit too much for everyone except me. Thus in 2020, in spite of COVID locking everyone down so they really shouldn’t have had anything better to do than play a few of their games, I was, disturbingly, the only winner, and got 3 new games for my trouble.
Of course, even during the first year we embarked on this little group dare, I was the only one who actually succeeded, so we’ve decided to mix things up once again, especially because Chris whined incessantly about “wanting to play the games HE picks,” even though he didn’t even manage to do that in 2019. Chris came close to succeeding in 2020, but ultimately made the silly mistake of playing “Watch_Dogs 2” instead of “Watch_Dogs 1,” and failing to submit a review of “Fable Anniversary” (which I have on word-of-mouth authority that he hated). While in 2019, Nick came close to success, completing …
Backlog: The Embiggening – January, 2021
Nelson Schneider - wrote on 12/26/20 at 03:31 PM CT
Welcome back to another year of glimpses into the immediate future, where we spy upon planned Games Industry releases, and appropriately temper our expectations with cynicism. As per usual, January is never a particularly full month, usually relegated to deadline-missers that were supposed to launch during the previous September-through-December, or low-budget junk whose publishers didn’t want to compete with the big releases of the prior season.
It’s nice to start off the new year with a little bit of good news: There’s no shovelware… well, there’s no officially licensed shovelware, too-Casual-to-live non-games, or annualized treadmill releases… but there is a compilation of ‘Five Nights at Freddy’s’ titles, which comes dangerously close to all three categories without falling into any of them. At least now console peasants can join their PC gaming counterparts in experiencing this punishment.
Of course, the fact that the ‘FNAF’ compilation is, indeed, a …
MeltedJoystick Games of the Year 2020
Nelson Schneider - wrote on 12/20/20 at 02:56 PM CT
Here we are, once again. As we stand at the end of another cycle of seasons after slogging through a torturous trip around the Sun that made 2019’s “challenging” year seem like a cake-walk, we must look back and pass judgment on the hot “new” titles – that were, once again, mostly old, re-warmed slop.
But in spite of its overall insane levels of awfulness, 2020 was ever-so-slightly better than its predecessor in the realm of exclusives and RPGs, even though it was mostly flooded with big, sprawling Sandboxes, which have seemingly become the “default game” of the modern era, much like janky 2D Platformers were the default of the 8-bit and 16-bit eras.
As a Plague Year, 2020 saw huge sales numbers for both ‘comfort food’ style games and distanced socializing “games.” None of those actually contributed to the betterment of the medium as a whole, nor did they stand out as exemplary within their respective genres, so they’ve been left off the list.
Thus, …
Year in Review: 2020
Nelson Schneider - wrote on 12/12/20 at 03:37 PM CT
Another year has come and gone… and what a year it was! 2020 will live in infamy for numerous reasons, some of them actually having to do with videogames.
Top 5 Fails
5. Australia’s Conservatives Ban Basically Everything
In a year marked by social, political, and economic upheaval, it’s somewhat reassuring that, at least in the Land Down-Under, conservatives are doing what they always do, and trying to ban porn, because “think of the children!” And it’s even more reassuring to know that they’re doing it in the same ham-fisted manner as their counterparts across the sea, creating a stupidly vague law that essentially bans everything resembling ‘mature’ content from games, movies, books, and every other form of media.
4. DRM Returns in Force Under the Friendly Guise of “Anti-Cheat”
Good old corporate capitalism is still doing its thing. Instead of letting the invisible hand regulate the exchange of goods, these corrupt cronies have remained obsessed …
Review Round-Up: Fall 2020
Nelson Schneider - wrote on 12/05/20 at 03:50 PM CT
Welcome back to another installment of the MeltedJoystick Review Round-Up. Here’s what our staff has reviewed since last time:
Nelson’s Reviews:
If I thought my Summer of COVID was mediocre, then the Autumn of COVID was even mediocre-er. I only had two stunningly positive experiences, with one being the huge-ass Sandbox game I started on my birthday in August, and played for a whole month. That’s what I call value for the money! There were no completed coop games in Fall (we’re almost done with our current one, but it’ll take one or two more sessions/weeks), but I did manage to get through a number of single-player titles, most of which were new acquisitions instead of well-aged muck dredged up from my backlog. Unfortunately, most of them turned out to be stunningly average.
“Assassin’s Creed: Odyssey” – 4.5/5
“Hob” – 3/5
“The Legend of Zelda: A Link Between Worlds” – 4/5
“Bloodstained: Ritual of the Night” – 3/5
“Battletech” – …
Backlog: The Embiggening – December, 2020
Nelson Schneider - wrote on 11/29/20 at 04:46 PM CT
Welcome to the final look into the future for the Plague Year of 2020! It’s been a long, tiresome, awful ride of a year across the board, not just for Games Industry watching, and it’ll be good to start fresh in 2021 with a new President, a new COVID vaccine, new consoles… and the same old gridlock, polarization, and crappy game releases. Some things seem like they will never change.
With the Holiday season coming up, of course there’s shovelware, as publishers frantically scramble to push licensed trash out the door in time for ignorant gift shoppers to be bamboozled by name recognition. But this month, the licensed shovelware looks a little different than it usually does: We’ve got games based on the TV show “Peeky Blinders” and the choreographed-violence movie franchise, ‘John Wick.’ Usually, licensed shovelware is targeted toward kids and based on whatever shonen anime or educational pre-school show happens to be ‘popular’ at the time. But these two IPs …
10 Dead Series that Need to be Revived in the 9th Generation
Nelson Schneider - wrote on 11/22/20 at 04:25 PM CT
Way back in 2012, I wrote up a listicle of 10 sequels in long-running series that should have been released during the soul-crushingly awful 7th Generation, but weren’t. The good news is, FOUR of those ten sequels that didn’t manifest in the 7th Gen actually did come to light in the 8th Gen, with “Final Fantasy 15,” “Half-Life: Alyx,” “The Legend of Zelda: Triforce Heroes,” and “Baldur’s Gate 3” all appearing on my last list (though not necessarily by their exact names). The bad news, of course, is that “Final Fantasy 15” is crap, “Half-Life: Alyx” is shackled to expensive VR hardware, “Triforce Heroes” is crap, and “Baldur’s Gate 3” is still in Alpha. What can you do?
Now, as the 8th Generation comes to a close, it’s time to take a look at what other dormant IP the Games Industry is still sitting on, denying we the gamers the joy of experiencing them, while denying they the corporations the profits to be had from them. Not only are these …
Australia’s Culture War
Nelson Schneider - wrote on 11/15/20 at 03:01 PM CT
Recently, news broke of a ridiculous new legal situation in Australia, the Land Down-Under. Usually, those of us in the West who are irritated, exasperated, frustrated, and fed-up by our own nations’ governments’ (and citizens’) inexhaustible levels of stupidity like to fantasize about moving to Australia, much like Alexander, when he had his “Terrible, Horrible, No-Good, Very Bad Day,” since, compared to the United States, Europe, and Russia, nothing bad happens down there.
Unfortunately, that’s all changed. Hot (no pun intended) on the heels of Oz catching fire and a large part of the continent and its wildlife being reduced to cinders, the Australian government changed control. In May 2019, in a shocking reversal that caught everyone by surprise, the Conservative Coalition won control of Australia’s federal government in an upset, swung, unsurprisingly to Americans, by Australia’s own Religious Right.
Oz’s politics are as alien as its collection of …
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